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Wednesday, November 9, 2011

I am am so grateful it worked!

Oh boy, so if you know me you know I'm a bit of a procrastinator. (My mom can vouch for this!) Well, I had a physics lab this past week and of course waited until last night start it. I had to build a motor by making two electromagnets using copper wire and nails. I was looking forward to building it, but was also a little scared. I've never built a motor before and was so paranoid that I would mess up in any or all of the steps. So, it took way too many hours and help from Jonathan, but it was ready to be tested. At first it didn't look like I would be able to test it until today at school. (Yeah that's terrifying!) Then I realized that the battery in my phone should be enough to get the motor running and sure enough it worked! Boy was I relived! That could have been the end of the story, but it wasn't.

I took my motor school and it was acting up, so I tried a few simple things and it worked. Then my lab partner looked at my motor and was telling me that I could probably get it to run on even less volts. At first, I was content that my motor was just working and going to get a decent grade. Then, I was tempted by the idea of having one of the best motors in my class. So I decided to go ahead and improve my motor. Part of the motor has bent nails wrapped in copper wire and so we were going to try to bend them more. In the process of bending the nails, part of the copper wire broke. (NOT GOOD!) We tried an easy way to fix it, and of course it didn't work. So we unwrapped all of my hard work from the night before and fixed the break. I re-wrapped it and thankfully it WORKED!

Now, why this experience made me so grateful. Throughout this project, I was stressed and worried. (Jonathan got to see this firsthand.) Last night, after testing it I honestly thought it was all over and it really could have been. I wasn't content with the working motor that I had. I wanted something better than what I already had and as usual that's when things fall apart. When we were unwrapping the wire, I honestly felt like I was unraveling too. I was so worried that I had totally ruined my project and wasn't going to get any points on it. Thankfully, the last fix worked. I learned from this simple project that I should be grateful for what I have. I have such a wonderful life and shouldn't be unhappy because of things beyond my control. Though, the best part of this experience is that even if I try to force things in a way that they don't need to be, I can turn to our Heavenly Father and He will help things work out. I'm so grateful that I learned this lesson in a way that was relatively painless, but I hope that it will stick with me.